


scenes from a thesis on access intimacy

by prettydizzeed



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Access Intimacy, Author is disabled, Canon Disabled Character, Chronic Pain, Disability, Fluff, M/M, Tenderness, Vacation, author has chronic pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:49:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28554171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: When people ask how they got together, they say they met at work. They don’t say that Newt knocked way too loudly on Hermann’s door the day after they stopped the world from ending and said, “My eye has been fucking with my depth perception, which might just be worse for me because I’m the idiot who Drifted via upcycled garbage twice, but just in case, I figured it’d make using your cane harder if you were experiencing that symptom, too, so—” and gestured to the food he’d brought.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb, Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 12
Kudos: 60





	scenes from a thesis on access intimacy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bitmeddler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitmeddler/gifts).



> for bitmeddler - happy holidays! your prompts were all great, so i ended up incorporating several of them; i hope you enjoy!

i.

“I love this song!” Newton says, bouncing on his toes a bit. Hermann raises an eyebrow, but he can’t help the way the corner of his mouth turns up with it.

“Yes, I gathered as much from the exuberant demonstration of your air-guitar prowess.”

“Oh, you love it,” Newton says, dropping his invisible pick to flap a hand at him. “C’mon, Herms, dance with me,” he cajoles.

“Even if I wasn’t having a bad pain day, the use of that godforsaken term undeserving of the designation of ‘nickname’ would’ve solidified my decision as a resounding  _ no. _ ” 

Newton rolls his eyes. “I didn't mean  _ stand up,  _ I’m not that kind of asshole. C’mere,” he insists, holding a hand out to Hermann, sticking out his lower lip and widening his eyes. Hermann sighs, but the way Newton grins at it assures him Newton knows the put-upon attitude is an act. 

Hermann takes his hand, lifts his feet off the floor, and allows Newton to tug him to the center of the lab. “This is incredibly juvenile,” he says, which is exactly what he’d said when Newton showed up with the decidedly not PPDC-regulation rolly chair, but he can’t deny it’s proven useful. 

“Combined with your old-man sweater, it cancels out to make you look your actual age,” Newton says pleasantly, resting one hand on Hermann’s shoulder and taking Hermann’s hand in the other. It’s not a slow song, but Newton doesn’t seem to mind, or maybe he only knows the one dance. Either way, the contrast is as familiar and absurd as Newton himself. Hermann rests his feet above the wheels of the chair, and Newton shifts it gently as he steps, turns Hermann by the movement of their hands as he shifts side to side, humming to himself. The fulcrum-and-lever of them, angle-and-compass, easy calculations and adjustments—it’s a comfort that settles around Hermann like a shawl, seeps into him like the warmth of a swallow of tea. 

The song changes, but Newton doesn’t stop, and Hermann doesn’t tell him to. Instead, he rests his forehead against Newton’s soft stomach, the thin t-shirt worn and smelling like him. 

“I love you,” Hermann mumbles into the fabric, and Newton smooths his hand along Hermann’s hair. Hermann can tell he’s smiling without needing to look up.

“I love you, too.”

ii.

“Shit, thanks, babe,” Newt says, propping himself up on one elbow and squinting into the light at the open bedroom door.

“Honestly, Newton, it’s not a big deal.” Hermann sets the soup down carefully on the bedside table and busies himself getting the lap desk set up and propping pillows up behind Newt. Such a mother hen, this guy, seriously, although he’d never admit it. “It’s not like it’s from scratch.”

Newt snorts. “Yeah, we both know how  _ that _ went.” 

Hermann’s back straightens and his eyes narrow, even as he unconsciously smooths the wrinkles out of Newt’s shirt sleeve. “I still do not think it was as bad as you make it out to be,” he insists primly.

“Hermann, I say this with all the unquantifiable love in my heart: it was an unmitigated disaster. It was inedible. By some act of magic you managed to burn half of the ingredients and undercook all the others.” Newt’s laughing now, picturing Hermann’s face when he tried valiantly to stick to his guns and swallow a spoonful and couldn’t manage it, spluttering and cracking up at himself in the way he rarely relaxed enough to do. They’d ordered Japanese after that, old habits dying hard or something. 

“Yes, well.” Hermann’s smiling, too, in the corner of his mouth the way he does when he’s trying to hide it, lips pressed harder together than normal. He’s relieved to have lifted Newt’s spirits, Newt knows, although he’s way too conscious of not making Newt insecure about feeling like shit sometimes (lately, kind of a lot of the time) to ever say as much. “No licorice aftertaste here, thank the lord.”

“You didn’t even use any ingredient with anise!” Newt says, still disgusted and amazed every time he thinks about it, and Hermann can’t hold back his laugh, or maybe just doesn’t want to anymore.

iii. 

Newton spits coffee halfway across the room. “You’re cleaning that up,” Hermann warns at the same time Newton says, “ _ Dude. _ You have a tattoo?!”

Hermann glances down at his forearm, sweater sleeve pushed up to his elbow. It’s hotter than usual in the lab, he swears, even if Newton says it doesn’t feel any different to him. “Yes.”

“Of… a fork?”

Obviously. Hermann rolls his eyes. “Yes.”

“What’s it mean?” Newton asks, and Hermann shoots a glance at him. He looks genuinely interested, though, not mocking, so Hermann closes his eyes, inhales through his nose for a four-count, and looks at him.

“It’s a reminder that I’m justified in being angry.” Newton’s brow puckers thoughtfully, his eyes still tracing the lines of the ink, and Hermann expands beyond his standard answer, the one he gives baristas and taxi drivers and his boss, once, when he was younger and less vigilant about keeping his sleeves down around people he didn’t want to know real things about him. “There’s… a writing piece, from when I was younger, that ends with the speaker saying that every time someone is ableist to her, she’s going to stab them with a fork, leave it stuck in their skin, until she shoves the last one down their throat.”

“Holy shit,” Newton says, but he doesn’t look revolted. He looks—impressed, like he didn’t know Hermann had it in him, didn’t sense the capacity for true rage under the nigh-constant irritability. “Cool,” Newton says, and promptly gets distracted by a number on one of his incessantly beeping machines. Hermann has to remind him later to clean the dried coffee off the floor, which Newton whines about until long past the point Hermann normally would’ve started writing a complaint, but—he keeps glancing at Hermann’s arm, even though he’s finally turned the heat up and the cuff of Hermann’s sleeve is back at his wrist where it belongs, almost like Newton isn’t aware of himself doing it. 

Hermann looks down at the blank grievance form and thinks about Newton’s tattoos, what they may say about his own strange, sharp capacity to feel, and doesn’t write a word.

iv.

When people ask how they got together, they say they met at work. They don’t say that Newt knocked way too loudly on Hermann’s door the day after they stopped the world from ending and said, “My eye has been fucking with my depth perception, which might just be worse for me because I’m the idiot who Drifted via upcycled garbage twice, but just in case, I figured it’d make using your cane harder if you were experiencing that symptom, too, so—” and gestured to the food he’d brought. It wasn’t even standard cafeteria stuff; it was a stack of differently-shaped to-go boxes that turned out to be all of Hermann’s favorites, things Newt had known for years and ones he’d somehow sifted out of the influx of details in the Drift. 

They don’t tell people that Hermann hadn’t left his room all day for that very reason, aching and exhausted and recoiling at the thought of that long stretch of open hallway, all the opportunities to fall. They spread the feast out and ate on the floor, Hermann sitting on a cushion and Newt holding his hands out to help him up after they were done without really thinking about it. The right way, too, grabbing onto each other’s wrists, not that handclasp shit everyone wants to do that can’t support hardly any weight. 

They don’t tell people that Hermann asked if Newt wanted to spend the night, because they may be two grown men hurting in more places than they’d ever hurt before and the PPDC-issued bunk may be offensively small but Hermann had seen Newt’s mind, too, the things he needed that he’d never admit. 

They don’t tell people that Newt said yes, climbed in bed in his sweats that still had crumbs in them, and Hermann said “I swear on my life, I will not put up with you getting food in my bed for the rest of our lives, this is only because it’s a special circumstance and I couldn’t get to my lint roller if I tried.”

They don’t tell people about the pause, maybe the longest Newt has taken to respond to a statement in his life. How he quietly asked, “The rest of our lives?” and Hermann blinked and cleared his throat and said, “Well. I mean. If you’d like.” and Newt fumbled for his hand, fell asleep with Hermann’s thumb tracing the golden spiral on his palm. 

v.

White-knuckling his way through Newton’s driving is perhaps the only time Hermann regrets not having a license, even though that certainly wouldn’t work out well. They manage to make it to the cabin with only one notable argument on the road, though, and Hermann folds his map neatly and hauls their bags out the backseat while Newton assembles his scooter. 

The driveway is paved, a rare luxury given the dirt roads they’ve been traveling for the past few hours. Hermann drives the scooter up the ramp to the front door while Newton retrieves the keys and opens it. They had to shell out a lot more than the going rate of the other AirBnB options for this, but the relief of finding an accessible place at all was worth it. 

“Wanna check out the view?” Newton asks after they’ve unpacked, and Hermann nods. He’s tired and more than a little sore from the travel, but he’s also more excited than he can ever remember being on a vacation; family trips growing up were always more stressful than relaxing, especially after he became disabled and had to navigate the options of pushing himself too far or holding his family back from their fun, a tightrope far too narrow to balance on with a cane. So when Newton suggested a trip, he was nervous, until he turned the laptop around and showed Hermann where he was thinking of staying. 

Hermann’s heating pad has joined the quilts on the bed, their various soaps and hair care products sit in the basket beside the shower bench, and his scooter is parked by the door. They sit on the bench on the back porch, mountains stretching around them to cradle the house in their palm. There’s a hot chocolate in Newton’s hand and a mug of tea in Hermann’s, Newton’s free arm around his back, and when his cane clatters to the floor, he doesn’t even roll his eyes. 

The next day, they take a nearby trail, the incline and terrain manageable for the scooter, and when they reach the waterfall, mist swirling around him and the man he loves at his side, Hermann feels a tear fall down his face and onto the damp ground. “I never thought I’d have this again,” he admits quietly, his own voice barely audible over the rush of the water, and Newton takes his hand. Years ago, back before the world almost ended a few dozen times, it would’ve been unfathomable—not only being loved but loving himself, spending occasional days without taking a single step and still feeling strong; standing side by side with someone at the bathroom mirror, taking their medications in tandem; lying awake in bed together in two different types of pain. 

“There’s no such thing as independence,” Newton told him once, rolling his eyes. “We all need each other. It’s just that only some of us are smart enough to admit it.” It was a targeted statement, sure, Newton irritated at Hermann’s obstinance and Hermann irritated at his own shame, but he feels only warmth when he thinks about it now. They’ve built a love language all their own, a mosaic of ointments and pill bottles and cups of water and reminders and ramps, a process as natural and stubborn as the river cutting through the rocks to kiss the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a fork tattoo and couldn’t resist giving hermann one, too. the writing piece is “Fork Theory” by Cade Leebron
> 
> i’m on tumblr @campgender or my disability sideblog @crippleprophet if you want to say hi!


End file.
